A Bezos Company Will Make Engines for Rockets

The space race is shaping up as a matchup of billionaires, with Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, facing off against Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX and Tesla, over the future of human spaceflight.

Blue Origin, a private space company owned by Mr. Bezos, said on Wednesday that it had agreed to work with a joint venture run by Boeing and Lockheed Martin to build new engines for their Atlas 5 rockets.

That venture, called United Launch Alliance, has sent nearly all United States spy and military satellites into space in the last decade, but a rise in tensions with Russia this year after its annexation of Crimea has forced the venture to look for a replacement. In May, Russia threatened to stop delivering the engines, known as RD-180s, in response to American sanctions against top Russian officials, though there has been no evidence yet that it will follow through.

News that Blue Origin would assume a bigger role in space launches came as NASA on Tuesday announced it had picked Boeing and SpaceX to ferry astronauts to the International Space Station and replace the retired space shuttle program. Boeing plans to use Atlas 5 rockets for its manned spacecraft, while SpaceX will use its existing rocket, the Falcon 9, to propel its new capsule. The first flights could take place as early as 2017.

By working with Blue Origin to build new American-made engines, Boeing and Lockheed sidestep the politically sensitive issue of the Russian RD-180 engines on the Atlas 5 for NASA and military missions in the future.

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Jeff Bezos, right, the founder of Blue Origin, and Tory Bruno, chief of United Launch Alliance, with a model rocket engine.CreditWin McNamee/Getty Images

It also throws Mr. Bezos directly into the contentious battle that Mr. Musk has been waging to force SpaceX into the business of launching military satellites. In April, Mr. Musk sued the Air Force to reverse an $11 billion contract awarded to U.L.A. to launch about 35 satellites over five years, citing the hazard of using Russian engines.

The move angered Air Force officials who have been working to certify SpaceX for future launches and are eager to introduce competition into the business to reduce launch costs.

News that the Atlas 5 rocket will eventually be using American engines made by Mr. Bezos’s company is likely to be welcomed by the Air Force and congressional leaders.

U.L.A. started using the Russian RD-180 engines for the Atlas 5 rockets since the 1990s as part of a deal reached after the end of the Cold War to improve technological cooperation with Russia. The engines have proved to be extraordinarily reliable as well as cheaper than anything available in the United States.

U.L.A. also uses another rocket, the Delta 4, whose engines are made in the United States. It has launched more than 80 satellites for defense and spy agencies with perfect success record in the last decade. U.L.A. has said it had enough RD-180 engines on hand to last for two years.

“The team at Blue Origin is methodically developing technologies to enable human access to space at dramatically lower cost and increased reliability,” Mr. Bezos said in a statement.

Blue Origin and U.L.A. said they planned to build the new engine in four years and begin full-scale testing in 2016 with first flights in 2019.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page B2 of the New York edition with the headline: A Bezos Company Will Make Engines for Rockets. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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